July 31st, 2010 by Jo

Everyone gets them on their site now and then. The internet user clicks on a link, and instead of the perfectly optimized page that you’ve worked so hard on, a big white screen appears with the dreaded ‘404: Page Not Found’ message at the top. These pages are a source of frustration both for site owners and site users, and they can have an impact on your SEO.

Search engine optimization is not just about placing the right techniques in the right spots on your site. It’s about ensuring that your site functions as well as possible so that it can communicate effectively with the search engines. There are a lot of things that can get in the way of this, but error pages are in the less subtle group. An error page stomps down in the path of a search engine spider. You want to remove that blockage as soon as possible.

Luckily, errors are usually easy to fix once you’ve spotted them. Unluckily, most site owners don’t maintain a frequent enough schedule of error checking to prevent error messages from getting in the way of their SEO.

Broken Hyperlinks Annoy Internet Users and Search Engines

The major consideration with error pages is that they are, well, errors. When your site doesn’t work properly, it annoys internet users and search engine spiders both. Internet users are a fickle bunch, and may not return to a site after they’ve encountered an error message. Search engine spiders are equally fickle, although they may return. Do you really want to wait the few weeks it will take for them to do so?

Having errors on your site can set your search engine optimization process back for weeks, depending on the page that’s lost. It’s vital to catch errors as soon as they happen. Depending on your traffic and your SEO plan, even half a day can have a very nasty effect. Talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about error fixing.

Bad 404 Page Customisation Can Affect SEO

Another way in which error pages can affect your site is when you’ve customized your 404 error page. Many sites have discovered that customizing their 404 pages can be a good way to make the best of a bad situation. It replaces the standard, boring message with something that provides a little more information and is maybe even a little entertaining. Customized 404 error pages can make a difference in keeping users on your site, but they can also make a difference to the way your pages are indexed – in a bad way.

The problem comes in when site owners try to sneak a little SEO into their customized 404 pages. It’s only natural to want to make the best use of every page that appears on your site, but the difference is that a 404 page is not supposed to appear on your site. In regards to the search engines, it is simply a message that something’s wrong and they should come back later. Putting keywords in can result in the page being indexed normally, so it’s best to leave SEO out of it.

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